Cranston sues operator of Rhode Island landfill over wastewater

Monday

Oct 28, 2013 at 4:26 PM

JOHNSTON, R.I. -- A lawsuit filed by the city of Cranston accuses the operator of Rhode Island's Central Landfill of sending a stream of highly polluted wastewater to the city's treatment facility. (Read the lawsuit at bottom of story.)

Mark Reynolds Journal Staff Writer mrkrynlds

JOHNSTON, R.I. -- A lawsuit filed by the city of Cranston accuses the operator of Rhode Island's Central Landfill of sending a stream of highly polluted wastewater to the city's treatment facility.

The lawsuit asks the Superior Court to force the operator, the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, to pay fines and also to compensate Cranston for "additional costs and expenses" incurred in handling the contaminated wastewater.

The suit, filed in Providence on Friday, also asks the court to order Resource Recovery to pay fines imposed by Cranston and to order Resource Recovery to halt all discharges to Cranston after the city has completed upgrades to its treatment facility in late 2015 and early 2016.

The amount owed to Cranston is "in the milions," according to the city's deputy solicitor, Evan M. Kirshenbaum.

Over the past year, Resource Recovery has built a sewer connection to facilities run by the Narragansett Bay Commission.

The landfill operator is building a new $27-million facility to pretreat the wastewater that will be sent through that new connection, which runs along Central Avenue and connects to preexisting Narragansett Bay Commission sewers at the junction of Central and Atwood avenues. Completion of that facility is expected in the spring of 2015.

Resource Recovery's executive director, Michael J. OConnell, said he could not answer specific questions about the lawsuit until he had read it.

In general, he said, Resource Recovery is ready to pay any money that it might owe to Cranston if the city can show proof that such money is owed.

"Our stance has always been, `If we owe you anything, we will pay you,' " OConnell said. "But they've never been able to demonstrate that we owe them anything."